


something’s telling me it might be you

by atlantisairlock



Category: Charlie's Angels (2019)
Genre: 5+1 Things, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Backstory, Charlie's Angels Secret Snowman 2019, F/F, Fluff, Good Morning Angels Discord Server, Happy Ending, Soulmate-Identifying Marks
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-25
Updated: 2019-12-25
Packaged: 2021-02-25 23:27:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,487
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21953653
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/atlantisairlock/pseuds/atlantisairlock
Summary: Five universes where Elena Houghlin is Sabina's soulmate.
Relationships: Elena Houghlin/Sabina Wilson
Comments: 11
Kudos: 246
Collections: Good Morning Angels Secret Snowman 2019





	something’s telling me it might be you

**Author's Note:**

  * For [americanhoney913](https://archiveofourown.org/users/americanhoney913/gifts).



> merry secret snowman to our very own discord charlie!!! hope you enjoy this fic! 
> 
> content notes for each section below.  
> one - parental emotional abuse, drug mention, canonical character death, implied boz/jane  
> two - parental physical abuse  
> three - parental emotional abuse, sexual assault mention  
> four - v bad language  
> five - implied spousal abuse mention, implied homophobia mention, background boz/jane 
> 
> title from 'it might be you' by stephen bishop.

> **one (where their name is written on your wrist)**

Sabina doesn’t remember a day in her life when her parents weren’t expressing their displeasure at her Name. They make snide comments about the fallibility of the system and how a woman could never complete another woman like a man might and less-than-subtly encourage her to look beyond her designated soulmate and search for someone with guts and ambition and a sizable bank account instead. They turn up their noses at her Name and at everything else she does. They tell her who she should be, must be, and never take a moment to really care about who she actually is.

By the time she’s ten, Sabina stops listening. She searches everywhere she goes for _Elena,_ and the older she gets the more desperate she becomes. Her mother gets progressively more relieved every year that passes where her soulmate doesn’t show up, and makes that relief clear. Sabina responds by lashing out, pulling away from the circle of rich, snobby scions her parents send her to school with and falling in with the wrong crowd instead. She stays out later, slinks through dark alleys in bad neighbourhoods. She has her first drink when she’s fourteen and her first cigarette a year later. A month before her sixteenth birthday she ends up in a holding cell after a club she frequents gets raided and they find LSD and MDMA on her person. Her parents pay people under the table, get her bailed out, take her home, and then summarily inform her that they’re throwing her out.

Her father tells her in no unclear terms that her rebellion and her slow descent into degeneracy are the reason why _Elena_ is never going to appear in her life, and that Sabina deserves it. Sabina punches him in the face and walks away with no intention of ever going back.

She’s seventeen when she meets her first Elena while she’s smoking with a group of friends outside a seedy strip club. A pretty girl with long hair and hazel eyes asks her for a light and introduces herself by name. Sabina gets one blinding moment of hope until she glimpses the girl’s wrist in the dim light. _Rachel._ She exhales and sags back against the wall she’s leaning on, because it all comes back to her then, an entire childhood her parents spent drilling into her head that _Elena_ wasn't really hers to call her own. Rationally she knows that just because this Elena isn't her soulmate doesn't mean she'll never find her right one, but it still sinks hooks into her guts and the anger and despair rages like an inferno, all-consuming, something that feels like it'll never go out.

She thinks that’s where it begins. The backsliding, further and further, into a dark pit where her days rush by in an endless haze of drugs and alcohol and petty crime. She gets away with it until she’s twenty-one, the second time in her life she ends up being arrested. A middle-aged man with the name _Emil_ on his wrist bails her out and introduces himself as Bosley. He makes her an offer. Sabina accepts. It’s the best decision she ever makes in her life.

She goes to California. She trains to be an Angel. They help her get clean and back into fighting shape. Townsend, and Charlie, give her a purpose. They don’t tear her down or disparage her the way her parents always did. Her Bosley claps her on the shoulder when he catches her staring at her wrist one day and tells her it took him thirty-three years to find his Emil. When the time is right, he promises her. For the first time in her life, Sabina believes.

Many years after, she is dispatched to Rio. She meets a new Angel named Jane who is serious and withdrawn and wary. She has the name _Rebekah_ on her wrist and Sabina sees her brush her fingers against it over and over, like she needs to keep reassuring herself that it’s there. She tries asking; Jane rebuffs her and Sabina backs off. The subject is touchy. She gets it, better than anyone.

They’re not friends. Not yet. Jane pushes her off the roof and Sabina doesn’t forget even after a year. They meet again in Paris to work on the same assignment with another Bosley she’s never met before. He tells her he’ll be meeting someone named Elena Houghlin, and Sabina doesn’t flinch. Part of her has given up, a bit, for a long time now. Part of her still carries the weight of her parents’ cruel words, deep in her bones even after so many years away from them. And part of her isn’t sure she deserves a soulmate any more. She got lucky enough with Townsend. Maybe that should be all she gets.

But then they get to Hamburg. Things go south really fucking fast and she ends up on a bike roaring after Hodak in his UAV, sending it flying in his direction and knocking him off his feet. He still ends up getting away, and she turns her focus to helping Jane and Elena out of the river to safety. Edgar is dead, Elena is terrified, and Jane’s eyes are blank and her expression tells of overwhelming grief, so in that moment, literally nothing is on Sabina’s mind except getting them all to safety. She contacts the Agency and steals a car and drives them to the coordinates she’s given. Elena all but tumbles out of the car once they get there and throws up for twenty minutes. She doesn’t get the chance to introduce herself until Bosley arrives and shuttles them all into the safehouse and right before Elena goes to wash up and get a change of clothes, she turns to Sabina. “So that’s Jane. Who are you?”

“I’m Sabina,” she replies, and Elena goes completely still. Her hand goes to her wrist, almost unconsciously, and Sabina feels that unfamiliar stirring of hope, called back from when she was seventeen. Elena blinks, staring at her. “Sabina? S-A-B-I-N-A?”

Her voice trembles. Sabina isn’t sure why her vision is going a little blurry until she realises her eyes are watering, her voice is thick with emotion. “Yeah.” She raises her hand, wrist up, so Elena can see her own name written on her skin. “I guess it’s you.”

Elena’s answering smile could light up a city. She steps in close and Sabina lets herself lean into her embrace and hear Elena’s choked gasp of _finally._ Finally. Sabina closes her eyes and lets her parents’ cold voices and cutting words slip away for the very last time. She found her. She’s complete. She’ll never be alone again.

> **two (where you know it the first time you touch them)**

Growing up, everyone says the same thing. They tell her that when she meets her soulmate, she’ll know. They tell her there’s no way to describe it. You touch them, and the whole world explodes. The exact sensation is different for everybody, but you always know.

The first time Sabina’s father hits her, it feels like something explodes, too. She’s six years old and dizzy with the pain and cringing up at her father looming over her, screaming about something she did. Two decades on she doesn’t remember what she did, but on her worst nights she still can feel the echoes of his palm against her cheek.

She overhears a schoolmate talk about meeting her soulmate, shaking their hand and feeling like she was punched in the chest. Sabina pulls away and gingerly touches the bruises on her own.

She stops letting people touch her. Someone shoves her in school and she acts on instinct, kicking the shit out of him and giving him a bloody nose. She gets a beating when she gets home, and her mother can’t stop yelling at her about how she’s dragging the family name into the dirt and screwing up their picture-perfect lives.

She doesn’t scream back. When she’s sixteen she just packs a bag and runs away, runs as far as she can, until she doesn’t recognise her surroundings any more. Her parents don’t come looking and she never expects them to. She spends the cash she steals from her parents’ safe as carefully as she can, tries to find work that pays her under the table. It still doesn’t last. First she begs, then she steals. She gets used to being hungry and tired.

When she’s nineteen she gets caught stealing food from a small grocery store. A beautiful young woman steps in when the owner tackles her to the ground and offers to pay for what she stole. He takes the money, grumbling, and tells Sabina to stay the hell away or he won’t be so lenient the next time. Sabina, face bruised and still on the ground, stares up at the woman, who offers her hand. She doesn’t take it, and after a few moments the woman lets it drop back to her side and simply waits for Sabina to get up.

Sabina manages to thank her, choking on the humiliation and anger of it. The woman just watches neutrally as she picks up the food she stole and gathers it all into her arms. She offers Sabina a place to stay and a steady income that will get her off the streets for good. Sabina informs her that she doesn’t really intend to go into sex work.

To her surprise, the woman laughs. It’s a genuine laugh. She tells Sabina that she likes that attitude, and she thinks Sabina would be an excellent asset, and won’t she just hear her out? She’ll buy her lunch.

Sabina makes her choice and doesn’t walk away, more because of the promise of free food than anything. But in every world, she still cares more about the greater good and doing the right thing than most people think she does. When she takes her leap of faith, she jumps right into it. Training is hard but rewarding. Her rule about not touching people gets thrown out of the window because she has to learn how to fight close-combat and, more importantly, learn to trust people again. Every time she gets a particularly rough hit and ends up on the ground with the world spinning, she wonders if the person she’s sparring with is her soulmate. She clenches her jaw and never asks. It reminds her too much of being six years old and coming to understand that her own father was willing to raise a hand to her. If that’s how it feels, she doesn’t want that. She wants to be strong. She doesn’t want to deal with the idea that anyone she loves, or believes she should love, could hurt her, ever again.

She gets her tattoo and gets sent out on missions. She slips back into keeping her distance but she still flinches every time she makes skin contact with someone else. It feels like her years are spent holding her breath. Waiting. Not being completely sure what she’s waiting for.

She ends up thrown to the ground by an explosion after a heart-in-her-throat chase down the streets of Hamburg. A murderer walks away from her and she doesn’t pursue him. Her loyalty is to her people first. Jane surfaces holding Elena, swimming strongly to a ladder, shoves Elena onto the rungs first and tells her to climb. Elena stumbles on the second-last rung and without thinking - because before anything else, before her fear and her rage and the trauma she carries, she just wants to help - Sabina reaches out to help her steady herself.

Their hands clasp. Sabina’s world explodes.

It’s nothing like being punched. There is no pain, just something roaring in her chest and settling in her stomach - the last piece of a puzzle clicking together, tectonic plates shifting into place. For a moment it feels like there will never be any pain again, like this touch she shares with her soulmate has momentarily erased all traces of it from her world, like all of it was worth it to come to this point where she met her. It’s like light, expanding inside her. She finally understands.

When it clears, she sees Elena in front of her, staring at her with the same shock on her face. Jane is standing over both of them, looking confused, but Sabina has never felt so sure about anything in her life. She tightens her grip on Elena’s hand, and Elena lets herself be pulled closer.

“Nice to meet you,” Sabina says, and thinks she’s never going to let go.

> **three (where you don't see colour until you see them)**

Up until she goes to elementary school, Sabina genuinely believes the world is black and white. Her parents never say anything to the contrary. When her teacher talks to them about colour she’s the only one who has absolutely no idea what that means. Her teacher gives them a brief overview about soulmate colour theory but tells Sabina to go home and ask her parents anyway. She does. Her father scoffs and tells her neither he nor her mother have ever seen colour. He says they weren’t soulmates, that neither of them have met their soulmates, but it doesn’t matter. There are more important things in the world than some bullshit idea of ‘true love’, and seeing the world in black and white is a better deal, anyway. He tells her that colour is a distraction and that paring the world down to grayscale means you only ever see what really matters. It’s an _advantage._

And her parents are rich, and successful, and well-respected for their ambition and drive and long laundry list of achievements, so for the longest time, Sabina believes it. Black and white is all she knows. It doesn’t stop her thriving. She can’t conceive needing anything else. If her parents haven’t needed colour, all their lives, to get where they have today, then why would she?

When her father is forty-two, he finally meets his soulmate and his perspective does a one-eighty overnight. He comes home with divorce papers for Sabina’s mother and barely gives Sabina a second glance. They have a prolonged screaming match in the living room that Sabina tries to pretend she can’t hear. Her father tells her mother, cutting and cruel, that she’ll never know how beautiful the world is in its full spectrum of colour. Her mother tells him he’s a hypocritical son of a bitch and she’s going to take every goddamn cent of his she can and live out the rest of her life in unthinking luxury. She fights for full custody of Sabina and gets it without much of a fuss from her father’s side. Sabina goes from resenting her father for not fighting harder to keep her in his life to resenting her mother for only doing it to take one more thing away from her ex-husband in order to feel like she won. She gives Sabina a hefty monthly allowance and absolutely nothing else, preferring to spend her time working and networking and proving to the world that she’s better than her ex, consumed by her anger and her hatred.

Sabina sees her father exactly twice after the divorce. The first time is at an awkward Christmas dinner where he raves to her about the sheer beauty of his new world and how Sabina has no idea what she’s missing, and Sabina half-listens and spends her time avoiding his soulmate’s suspicious, loathing glare. When she’s sixteen she gets invited to his new baby’s first month celebration. He shows his new daughter off to everyone in attendance and proclaims her his first _real_ child, a child that’s truly his, born to the person the universe has decided he should spend his life with. Sabina listens and her stomach turns over and over.

She doesn’t see him again. When she turns twenty she gets sick of her mother’s obsession with proving herself to a person and a world that doesn’t care about her anyway, and leaves. She hops from job to job - the ones that allow employees that can’t see colour, anyway, of which there are discouragingly few. After she’s fired from a waitressing job because she punches a customer that gropes one of the seventeen-year-olds she’s working alongside, she gets approached by Townsend and doesn’t even believe it’s anything more than a prank for a good twelve hours. She’s not stupid, and she hasn’t believed her father’s crap about grayscale being an ‘advantage’ for a long, long time now. No intelligence agency worth their salt is going to willingly employ someone who can’t see colour.

Only, it seems, they’re different.

They take her in. She bristles the first time she sees separated training areas for those who can see in colour and those who can’t, but as time goes by and she learns that they all get taught the same, just with different methods, her hackles start to lay flat again. No one ever compares her to another Angel, let alone one who can see in colour. No one ever makes her or her fellow recruits feel like they’re less useful or less capable for not seeing the world the same way. One of her trainers meets their soulmate one weekend they’re away and Sabina doesn’t find out until two months later because they just keep going on like nothing’s changed and they never treat the recruits any differently. She learns to _actually_ use her vision to her advantage while still being prepared for the day she finally meets her soulmate.

But nothing could have prepared her for going to Hamburg and positioning herself on top of the building opposite the cafe where Bosley meets Elena, peering at them through her binoculars, and having the whole world suddenly just _shift._ Sabina gasps and stumbles back, unbidden, almost dropping the binoculars five storeys down.

“Sabina? What is it?” She hears Jane ask through the comms, but she can’t reply. Sabina looks at her hands, trembling, her brain short-circuiting. She hasn’t seen her father in a decade but it all suddenly comes rushing back, and she feels like she finally understands. How could she not? Her world is - forever changed. Everything’s changed. Now she can finally see.

There are still things she can never forgive her father for, but Sabina thinks she gets it, a little bit, now. The beauty of the surroundings around her - and the bone-deep understanding that she can never be with anyone else. She doesn’t know anything about Elena but her name and her job, but she already knows this is it. This is what the universe has given her, and she doesn’t want anything else.

Later, she can see the gleaming white of the motorcycle she steals, the blue-green of the river she helps Jane and Elena out of, the dark brown of Elena’s eyes. She hears Elena’s hitch of breath when she meets Sabina’s gaze, the way her hands fly up to cover her mouth. A shift. A change. A whole new world.

“This is colour?” Elena breathes, almost like she can’t believe it’s real. “This is what I was missing? All my life?”

And Sabina thinks _no. You were. You were what I didn’t know I was missing, all my life._

> **four (where what they think of you appears on your skin)**

A good ninety-nine point nine percent of the population starts with _stranger_ and nothing else, plain black script somewhere on their bodies. Sabina gets it circling around her left ankle. It’s easy to hide, which her parents encourage her to do. They certainly hide theirs. She doesn’t really know why - most people she sees and speaks to, growing up, are happy to show theirs off. Come elementary school she catches glimpses of her parents’ skin and sees ugly, cruel words scrawled all over them and she finally starts to get it. It scares her even before she truly understands the weight behind the words. _Cheater. Fraud. Hypocrite. Bastard. Full of shit. Fucking bitch._

She’s pretty sure soulmates aren’t supposed to think those kinds of things about each other. Or yell at each other in earshot of their child. Or hit each other or say awful things about each other when they’re alone with her. She grows up carrying that fear on her shoulders, beneath her ribs. She can’t imagine her soulmate hating her the way her parents hate each other - can’t imagine being forced to spend her life with someone who calls her words like that. It scares her. Around her, her classmates swoon when they talk about their words and pray that they’ll cross paths with their soulmates sooner rather than later. Sabina can’t help but wonder if it’d be better to only have _stranger_ on her ankle her whole life.

No other words appear for her - or at least, that she notices, until she’s in Berlin, waiting to fly out to Istanbul. She idly reaches across to pour herself more wine from Saint’s stash and nearly drops her glass when she sees it on her upper arm. _Gorgeous._ A good word. Nothing like what her parents ever had on their skin. Sabina stares at it for five minutes before she can even accept that it’s real.

She has no idea who it is. _Gorgeous_ \- it says nothing. It’s a physical observation, appreciation of her looks, something that could cross the mind of even a random stranger passing her on the street. Someone she’ll never see again.

And she should feel more crushed about that. She should. She thinks she _would,_ only they’re on a mission and they have to fly off to Istanbul and go right to work and Sabina doesn’t have the luxury of time to mope about not knowing who her soulmate is and possibly never seeing them again. Angel first, her own self second - it’s always been that way since she got her wings. This changes nothing.

 _Brilliant_ and _ass-kicker_ appear above her collarbone and behind her ear respectively the morning they infiltrate the Derby, and they change everything. Sabina’s heart pounds when she thinks of the only three possibilities and she nearly throws up in the sink. She can’t deal with that. She doesn’t know how. She’s spent almost an entire lifetime half-believing she’d never find her person and now here they are, running by her side as they pursue a murderous assassin and a greedy traitor and a nameless shadow in the distance? She doesn’t know which one of them it is and she isn’t sure she wants to.

Then the quarry happens. Boz disappears. They have to steal back to the mainland on a ferry with Elena drugged out by her side and none of it fucking matters in the face of the world crashing to pieces around them. Jane saves her life. Boz comes back to them. Elena gets taken. Elena gets _taken_ and Sabina decides right then and there that they’ll get her back or die trying. They fly to Chamonix, she and Jane work in tandem to knock a guy out and get Hodak distracted so she can steal the key that will free Elena. The sheer relief that floods her when she opens the door and sees Elena, safe and sound, is like nothing else in the world. Elena hugs her tight and Sabina holds on as long as she can until they need to get to the lobby with the other Angels.

She misses _saviour_ scrawling itself onto her ribs and it’s gone by the time they extract John’s surrender and pack him up to be removed to HQ and questioned, but it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter because they leave and Sabina finally gets a good look at Elena and thinks _safe, found, alive, ours, perfect,_ and sees it all slowly ink itself into existence on Elena’s forearm, and there’s no stunned shock, no disbelief. Just understanding, acceptance, and _oh, it’s you, it’s always been you, maybe I’ve always wanted it to be you, maybe it’s all going to be okay._

Elena stares at the words, looks up and sees Sabina watching them appear. Her lip trembles, and she steps closer. “Sabina?”

“It’s you, right?” She says. “Elena? Tell me it’s you.”

Elena doesn’t reply. Just reaches out to brush her fingers against Sabina’s wrist, where the same black script begins to appear. _The one._ Elena makes a soft sound, telling of joy and wonder, and looks up at Sabina with a blinding smile. “It’s me.”

 _Of course it is,_ Sabina thinks, and everything finally settles into place.

> **five (where you have matching marks on your body)**

The marks come at age ten, they say. Nobody knows why - it’s just been happening for as long as anyone can remember. On your tenth birthday you wake up to a unique black mark somewhere on your body that’s a perfect match to just one other person in the world, and then the race is on to find them, wherever they might be.

Or at least, most people do. Her father did - woke up to a patch just above his knee that resembled what he used to call a misshapen frog. Her mother woke up to absolutely nothing and Sabina learns very quickly that she’s never stopped being resentful about it. She learns that her father met his soulmate when he was fifteen and she was seventeen and they were both waiting until the day they were both adults and could get married and be together for real. She learns that his soulmate was killed in a train derailment when he was nineteen and he was left adrift until he met her mother. Neither of them ever tell her that they don’t truly love each other the way husband and wife should, but she figures that out pretty quickly anyway.

On her tenth birthday, she gets her mark. It reminds her a bit of a cloud, turned on its side, below her left shoulderblade. Her mother sees it and proceeds to go to her room and lock herself in it for the rest of the day. Her father distractedly assures her that it’s nothing to do with her while trying to convince his wife to come out and have her breakfast. Sabina keeps her back covered and tries to believe that.

They don’t ever talk about her mark at home. Both of them are distant for more reasons than one. Sabina spends more time talking to her tutor, their chef, their valet, their gardener, their stable hand, anyone but her parents.

Her tutor is in her sixties, sharp as a needle. Her mark is vaguely sword-shaped, spanning the back of her hand. She tells Sabina that she’s never found the other person who has the exact same mark and that she doesn’t care. Sabina never figures out if she’s lying about one or the other or both. Their chef’s mark is unrecognisable under the ugly scars on her left leg. When Sabina is twelve she tells her matter-of-factly that her wounds were self-inflicted, that she made them after her so-called soulmate hit her while he was drunk and she left him. Their valet’s mark is scarred too, with evidence that someone tried very hard to remove it or change how it looked. He smiles gently at Sabina when she asks and tells her that he lived in a time and a part of the country where people didn’t believe matching marks could belong on people of the same gender. He never talks about his soulmate and Sabina doesn’t dare to ask.

She learns to loathe the bullshit Hallmark movies full of unadulterated fairy tale rom-com garbage where soulmates come together through their marks and live together happily ever after. She hates the thought that a single mark that scientists don’t really understand up into the present could define her life and fuck her up forever, like it did with the people around her. She never wears clothing that would reveal it, and steadfastly refuses to look at people’s marks when they’re showing them to her, trying to figure out if she might be the one they’re looking for. She decides, early on, that she’ll fall in love with whoever she fucking pleases. She spends her teenage years and young adulthood dating, hooking up with, sleeping with whoever she wants. Sometimes she meets people for a casual blind date and sees the abject disappointment on their faces when they finally set eyes on each other and they have a mark she knows she doesn’t match. She hates it. She doesn’t understand why and how people could possibly care so much.

Despite the otherwise clash in their personalities, Jane is the first person Sabina ever meets who feels the exact same way. Jane has three concentric circles just above her right hipbone and never gives them a second glance. She tells Sabina on the plane to Rio that her parents weren’t soulmates and they were perfectly happy and the whole thing is stupid anyway and leaves it at that. A year later they meet again, end up somehow or another in Paris and Hamburg and Berlin with Elena Houghlin and Boz, and while they’re in the wardrobe in Berlin HQ Jane tries out an outfit and they all hear Boz stutter to a stop when Jane takes her shirt off and her mark becomes visible. Sabina sees her expression open up into relief and joy the moment Boz lifts her own to show Jane her matching mark. Jane never outright changes her tune to Sabina, but she hears it anyway.

They get to Istanbul and end up in the Veliefendi and then in the huge quarry and she nearly gets crushed to death and their hotel collapses on them and they get to Chamonix to rescue Elena from the clutches of evil dickhead John Bosley and throughout it all, Sabina never sees Elena’s mark and neither does she care. In between the gunfights and the car chases she starts feeling the fond ache in her chest when Elena does something cute and nerdy, and her eye catches on Elena first in moments of happiness or of danger, and she has zero problem admitting she starts falling in love even before Elena gets kidnapped. After they rescue her and she gets to punch John in the face and they all get to go home, Elena kisses her when they land in California HQ and Sabina kisses her back with enthusiasm.

“You don’t care about your mark?” Sabina asks hesitantly, two weeks after it all dies down and Elena’s beginning her training and she’s dragging Sabina into her room after some excellent dinner and a lot of making out that Jane and Boz visibly gagged at. Elena’s already undoing the buttons on her jacket but she does pull back and smile at Sabina and say, simply, _no._ “I’ve never been a fan of letting the universe tell me what to do or who to love,” she says. “I choose that. And I choose you.”

Which is what Sabina’s always believed, right? Always sworn that she believes? She’s never laid awake at night, wondering, doubting, hoping. She’s never let her gaze catch on someone else’s mark. She’s never felt that sharp sting of jealousy watching Jane and Boz find each other - find themselves - in the middle of the first wardrobe in Berlin HQ. Never. _Never._ She swears it.

But Elena gets her shirt off and Sabina sees her back in the mirror, sees that expanse of smooth skin broken by a very familiar cloud-like patch, right below her left shoulderblade, and she starts laughing, and she can’t stop. She clutches Elena’s arms and laughs in the face of Elena’s visible confusion and concern and thinks _man, the world truly works in mysterious ways._

“I think the universe has spoken,” she answers, and shrugs her own shirt off to show Elena her mark. Enjoys the way Elena’s eyes widen and she stares and stares and finally starts snorting with laughter along with Sabina. “Are you kidding me? Are you for real?”

Maybe she laughs, or she cries, Sabina can’t really tell past the fierce kiss she sweeps Elena back into, both of them clinging on tight, and everything else fades away in favour of Elena’s warm weight in her arms, and Sabina doesn’t think this is how she expected everything to turn out, but she’s exactly where she needs to be, and that’s enough.

> **plus one (where you always, always just know)**

There are a thousand different universes, a thousand different worlds, a thousand different ways it happens and plays out to its conclusion, but the one thing that never changes is this - they always find each other, and they always say _I do._


End file.
